In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. The focus of this blog is on doing things, from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of things, along with comments from a retired radio engineer running from tech or science news to economics; from firearms to the world at large.

Thursday, July 31, 2014

As hard as it may be to call myself an athlete in any sense, I recognize that for an old dude I am. Or rather, was and that's the essence of ex-athlete's syndrome. Because I'm a lazy typist, I'll call that EAS.

In a nutshell, EAS is the result of too good memory. You did some activity for so long at some level, even if moderate, that you think you can always do it. My thing was cycling. For almost 20 years, from around 1990 until a few years ago, Mrs. Graybeard and I rode a lot. Our typical week was 12 miles every night after work, typically four nights a week, and long rides on the weekend. Our shortest weekend rides were 20 miles. Many weekends, we'd take off for the day (usually on Saturday) and ride most of the day. Favorite rides were 50 miles up to 80 miles. We've ridden centuries (100 miles) many times, and my personal longest ride was most of the 170 mile cross-Florida. We never rode terribly fast and stopped often for drinks or food or just to get out of the blazing Florida sun, but I didn't know a single 50-something couple that was doing what we were doing.

A few years ago, slightly before I started this blog in February of '10, we essentially just stopped. There's a handful of reasons, but in my mind we were always just taking off for a little while. The longest we had been off the bikes before then was about four months, after being hit by a truck. I was extremely lucky; I was let out of the ER about 4 hours later with admonition to see an orthopedic guy about a broken vertebra in my back. It wasn't a picnic; I was out of work for weeks and had a broken tailbone that hurt for about 9 months, but I walked out of the ER mere hours after being hit by a pickup truck. Mrs. Graybeard didn't get off even that easily and underwent extensive (incredible) surgery to repair her back. They installed rods to support the area, and rebuilt the crushed body of a vertebra with a cadaver thigh bone. She was in a hospital a week and rehab facility for another three weeks.

Still, after four months, we were ready to ride again, and it didn't take terribly long to get back to long rides at the same sort of pace. In my mind, all of this added up to somehow thinking the fitness and muscle tone I had was so ... permanent ... that it would never go away. I can always do it.

Needless to say, I don't "got this". I can't do it. I need to practice.

I've been been pressed for time lately and not writing as much. This is one of the reasons. Because I miss the fitness to be able to do things like build the shop furniture, or lie down to work under the console on the boat, or a dozen other things, without suffering for days afterward, I've started to try to get that back. Unfortunately, I need to do physical therapy-style exercises for some old injuries and the weight work is slow, but the stretching and bending is fairly effortless and I've even been riding. I have an indoor trainer I can put my bike on and ride against resistance indoors. (Current version - much newer and a bit slicker than mine. Not to mention about twice what I recall paying.) Yeah, I'm riding indoors instead of on the road. Why? Actually to play head games with myself. If I'm outside, I'm always going to want to press it a bit more and go farther. Riding on the trainer is much less enjoyable and I tend to just watch the timer and when it's done, I'm off that bike. I'm making myself stick to a program.

If you're not a cyclist, you've never seen O'Grady's cartoons and the "Old Guys Who Get FAT in Winter" theme... Maybe you have to be a sick cyclist to appreciate these.

MADISON, Wis. — At the risk of sounding a bit
curmudgeonly, I have to confess one thing. While there’s certainly
something positive to be said about the Internet of Things (IoT), I
can’t help feeling suspicious, weary, and a bit turned off by the whole
idea.

Aside from big-number projections (e.g., Cisco predicts 50 billion
IoT devices by 2020), which would tempt anyone into becoming an IoT
cheerleader, I haven’t seen a single credible-use scenario that might
lure the average consumer onto the IoT bandwagon.
Honestly, it creeps me out to think about my devices at home talking
to one another, doing stuff without my involvement, and talking about my
habits -- good and bad -- to total strangers (advertisers, service
providers, or just more machines), behind my back. There’s nothing warm
and fuzzy about this. At all. [Bold added - SiG]

That emphasized text raises an important point. Those of us in the technical fields have a tendency to think of something that would be cool and then do it simply because it can be done. On the other hand, the vast majority of people are not technophiles like us who do things because we can. They want to know just what they're getting for what they spend on the interconnectedness and thanks (in my opinion) to Edward Snowden, they increasingly want to know what privacy they're giving up to get that interconnection. Yoshida continues:

With this in mind, I’ve started asking industry sources for credible
scenarios under which IoT devices improve my life by talking to each
other. Readers are welcome to chime in below. Give me your best shot.
Convince me why my washing machine needs to strike up a conversation
with my gas grill.

The answers leave her flat. They're the same old home automation stuff that's been sold and resold for years. Oooh: a house that knows you're in the living room and can turn off lights for you, or change the temperature while you're coming home from work. The thing is, when you leave the trite and unoriginal, you end up at creepy pretty fast. Richard Doherty, research director at something called the Envisioneering Group says:

IoT will mean “peace of mind” allowances. For example, IoT could let
us know if Grandma opened the fridge this morning or used her Bluetooth
toothbrush.

IoT will also create insurance access. Did Rick walk his requisite one mile a day to earn his present insurance discount?

IoT offers public services. Are enabled air conditioners being throttled back 10% for brownout prevention?

In my mind, all of those get darned close to (or jump over) the "none of your damned business" line. I admit I would have felt better about my elderly mom living by herself with the first one (assuming she agreed to have it), but I'll have no part of the other two. But they go on from there into asking who controls what information is being handled and how it gets around. Predictably, the industry giants are starting Sumo matches; throwing salt and trying to force each other out of the ring. Intel, Qualcomm, AT&T, Time Warner and Google (among others) all want to be the one to see you crank your thermostat warmer some winter and promptly send you an ad for sweaters.

Monday, July 28, 2014

Hackers identifying with Hamas have sent threatening text messages to
Israeli mobile phone numbers, via Twitter and on Facebook feeds.

The problem: The Hebrew grammar and spelling are riddled with errors.

Instead of causing fear – as intended – Israelis have reposted the
messages with corrections and tips on how to better construct a
threatening message.

That's the spirit!

Earlier this week, Hamas hackers overtook the Domino’s Pizza Israel
Facebook page, posting threatening messages against Israelis. They
didn’t know Israelis have been punching out jokes at a quick pace. Hamas
hackers wrote: “Today will strike deep in Israel, Tel Aviv, Haifa,
Jerusalem, Ashkelon, Ashdod more than 2000 rockets. We’ll start at 7.
Counting back towards the end of Israel … Be warned!”

An Israeli response read: “Hey, please reserve a missile for me with
jalapenos, green olives, extra cheese, and mushrooms. You have my
address. Tell the delivery boy to activate the alarm when it is
arriving, so I know to put my pants on.”

... a recognizable wave of demoralization has
washed over Hamas’s combat battalions. “They simply escape, leaving
behind weapons and suicide bomb vests that were laid out for battle.
This morning we stormed a position, and they just weren’t there. I don’t
see a determined enemy. We have encountered stronger pockets of
fighting in the past. But now, I would not give them a high grade for fighting spirit.”

In the age of social media, it's inevitable that the conflict should spread to Facebook. It seems, though, that faces aren't the only images that Israelis are posting there as encouragement to the IDF.

Sunday, July 27, 2014

(story) Some dood with a new book doing the radio TV tour said, "Obama could kill someone, personally, on live TV, and would survive without getting impeached". Someone like me - or you, probably - would be painted in seconds as some sort of terrorist by the leftist media. Not enough senators would vote to bring to president to trial. That's more like the truth.

Besides, his replacement (and walking life insurance policy) is Joe Biden. How much better do you think that's going to work out?

Friday, July 25, 2014

I haz a stale. "Not so much writer's block, more like tired of writing about the same damned problems all the time." Including my stale. Besides, it has been a busy week and I haven't had much time to ponder what to write about.

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

A post over at Theredneckengineer got me thinking about this topic again. When you're done cutting metal, now what? Steel, except for stainless, will rust quickly in all but the driest climates. Aluminum won't rust, but it oxidizes and will develop a kind of cruddy, blotched look.

This has been a hot topic in the gun industry since before Sam Colt was a little boy. A lot of finishes exist; from Parkerizing, and bluing, to Cerakote and the dozens of other finishes. I'm going to focus on two simple processes: powder coating (because it's the one Redneck Engineer wrote about) and anodizing.

Powder coating is a painting process, and can be done to almost any material, like most painting. You can powder coat any metal: steel pieces or aluminum; titanium or brass. What's neat about the process is that you attach a ground wire to the piece to be coated and spray a powder that gets electrically charged in the gun. Instead of the overspray of paint that plagues spraying liquids, the powder is electrically attracted to the grounded piece. There's less over spray, and any overspray that happens is a powder that can be brushed off. Powder that goes beyond that part will actually turn around and come back to coat the other side. That's not to say you may not get better results turning the part, just emphasizing that attraction of the powder to the charged surface. Once the part is coated, it's then baked in an oven, where the powder turns into a liquid and flows over the surface. The temperature depends on the type of powder, but is around 300-400F. The result is a hard, chip resistant finish that holds up better than the spray paints I've been able to use.

Powder coating is new technology, but hardly exotic. Powder coating sets can be bought at Sears, Harbor Freight and many others. Two excellent sources are Caswell Plating and Eastwood; both of them are also excellent suppliers for anodizing.

Anodizing is an electrolytic surface treatment process that is most often done to aluminum. Compared to painting, it allows a more precise control of the finish thickness and typically looks better in a thin finish than powder coat tends to look. It's rather more involved than powder coating, but a good finish in almost any color imaginable is within the reach of determined folks. The word comes from using the material you're finishing as the anode (more positive piece) in an electrical circuit you make. Anodizing is often referred to by its "type" (these come from MilSpecs) , and you may have seen references to Type III anodizing as a selling feature for gun parts. Home anodizing is most often Type II, Low Current Density. There are good, detailed explanations on the web, but I find my favorite is gone tonight (haven't checked it for a while). This guy seems to have a couple of pages of his results and looks good to follow; but let me summarize here.

You may not have noticed the first important thing that was up there in the descriptions. Powder coating applies a layer of paint over the surface, hiding it to at least some degree. Anodizing is a surface treatment; that means it doesn't really cover the surface. However pretty your surface is before you start, that's how pretty it's going to be when you're done. The first step is to finish the surface until it is free of defects. Finishing metal surfaces is simple in concept, just tedious and time consuming. You sand with progressively finer abrasives and either leave a matte surface (600 grit on metal looks like a matte finish) or proceed to polish. Books have been written in place of that sentence, and industry has invested tons of money in getting pretty finishes faster.

The piece is then thoroughly cleaned and degreased. After completely cleaning it, so that water doesn't bead up on the aluminum at all, it's time to actually anodize. The work is submerged in a mix of sulfuric acid and distilled water. Yes, there's a specific ratio; no, I'm not going to tell you what it is. This piece is an overview, not instructions. Two electrodes go into the acid: the cathode goes to the negative side of your power supply while the piece you're finishing is the anode. The process depends on current, not voltage, so low voltage, high current supplies are usually used; the 12V, 20 to 30A supplies that hams use aren't adjustable enough although they're in the ballpark for capacity. You want a constant current supply with adjustable current. The actual anodizing part of the process takes a couple of hours, depending on how big the part is and how thick the layer you're striving for.

At this point, the parts have barely changed color, and they're coated with a thin, new coating of aluminum oxide (you can call it corrosion, white sapphire, or anodizing). The guys who do this refer to the finish having pores that are open. The parts are washed in distilled water, before going into the dying process - if you want to add color. The process is simple: heat a water solution of the dye (RIT clothes dyes are often used) up to about 140F, and suspend the part in it for a few minutes, checking to see if it has the color you want. The dying process is self limiting and the parts just can't keep getting darker after some time. If you don't dye the part, you go straight to the next step.

The final step sets the color permanently. You take the dyed parts and submerge them in boiling water for a half hour. This doesn't need to be distilled water. That sets the finish and results in the hard, colorful finish anodized parts are known for. That is, parts not intended to be tactical black.

The paintball guys are big on wild anodizing colors. Hard to imagine someone making an AR lower in this color scheme.

Anodizing can also be done on titanium, and the colors are obtained by allowing different thicknesses of the oxide layer to build up. Check out these titanium chopsticks, although the technique is commonly used in titanium jewelry.

This is admittedly a brief overview. Not enough detail to begin either technique but hopefully enough to tickle your interest and get you looking.

Monday, July 21, 2014

Weird Al Yankovic, the 80s parody king, has released his (probably) final album, and has been featuring a song per day for 8 days. I couldn't resist this one: Word Crimes.

Know when it's less or it's fewer
like people who were
never raised in a sewer
...
Hire some cunning linguist to
help you distinguish
what is proper English

As for "final album", I saw an interview with Al this morning, and he said it was his last album on a contract he's been under since the '80s, and while he intends to keep writing songs, albums are probably not the direction the world is going. IMO, look for Al to start selling singles rather than albums, probably through iTunes or something setup more for direct sale to consumers.

Saturday, July 19, 2014

While sipping coffee and trying to get my heart beating this morning, I heard something in passing that made my ears stand up like a Doberman's.

You might recall that earlier in the week, there was story that the Fed.gov was going to open a $50 Million resort for these children that are invading over the southern border, the Palm Aire Hotel and Suites in Weslaco, Texas. Complete with swimming pools, tennis courts, saunas - you name it - the hotel was to be renovated and house them for a couple of weeks, providing “health, mental health services, education, case management services” while they were being placed with family or foster families.

Think about that for just a moment. These illegals, who have no
right to be in the country, are going to be housed by the Department of
Homeland Security for two weeks and they’d receive health, mental health
services, education and case management services provided by taxpayer
dollars over that two week period.

Let’s contrast that with the VA hospital in Phoenix where men who
fought for America, who were injured, who bled for freedom were – and
probably still are being – put on waiting lists for medical care that
was promised them for their honorable military service. We’ve got
military veterans who are being put on phantom waiting lists for care,
who stay on those waiting lists for months or years, while illegal
aliens can receive care immediately.

You might also recall that there was somewhat of a public stink raised over this and the deal was dropped.

Today, the news droid dropped the name of who was getting the $50 million contract: the Baptist Child and Family Services. The Baptist Child and Family... a Christian charity?? Wait a minute. Our government - 99 and 44/100 % Muslim Brotherhood infiltrated, working with a Christian group? Sumthin jest don't seem right.

Not alone in my skepticism, The Right Curmudgeon started peeling back the layers of this onion and concludes BCFS is a new identity for ACORN. I'm sure all of my readers will recall that ACORN, the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, was brought down by James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles in a 2009 hidden camera video series, in which O'Keefe played a pimp and Giles one of his girls. As Right Curmudgeon points out, we all know ACORN:

They’re the “community service” organization, 100% funded by Democrats
with tax dollars, who were raking in hundreds of millions of shadow
money for a variety of housing and mortgage scams. They’re the people
that James O’Keefe brought down with a series of videos. Probably his
most famous was one of him and an attractive young lady dressed as a
pimp and a prostitute going to an ACORN office, telling them they were
in the sex trade and wanted a house but didn’t have any declared
income. ACORN was ready to help them falsify the paperwork to qualify
for a loan.

As a result of O’Keefe’s videos ACORN lost their government funding and disbanded. Of course, like zombies, they weren’t dead, they just morphed into several new “community service” organizations, again being fed with a combination of your tax dollars and money borrowed from the Chinese.

It's worth the time to RTWT. Right Curmudgeon looks into BCFS and this deal, asking a lot of very reasonable questions and trying to track down just who this group is:

These questions, to which the most transparent administration in
American history will never provide answers, heck, they may never be
asked, bring us back to BCFS. Given all their donation buttons, you’d
think they got their money from private donations and Baptist Charities,
probably supported by Baptist Missions organizations given the
countries they supposedly work in. Well, it appears you’d be wrong.

Their “Partners” page lists 22 governmental groups, both federal and
state, so it looks like the $50 million contract they walked away from
because of bad publicity is just a drop in the bucket. The number of
groups that appear to have religious affiliation? Zero. Groups
connected with any Baptist denomination? Zero.

Is BCFS really the reborn ACORN? I don't know, but they certainly don't appear to be a Baptist or Christian group either. They appear to have chosen the name to appear innocent. "Don't look here! We're just a bunch of boring, Baptist do-gooders".

Friday, July 18, 2014

Thursday, July 17, 2014

If you're old enough to be in college, the nation you were born in is falling apart. If you're in my age group, the country you were born in is gone. Victor Davis Hanson nails it in The Turbulent Summer of 2014.

What keeps the country afloat this terrible summer?

Some American companies produce more gas and oil than ever despite,
not because of, the Obama administration. Most Americans still get up
every day, work hard and pay more taxes than they receive in subsidies.
American soldiers remain the most formidable in the world despite the
confusion of their superiors. The law, regardless of the administration,
is still followed by most. And most do not duck out on their daily
responsibilities to golf, play pool or go on junkets.

Even that little bit of optimism is overstated. The statement that "Most Americans still get up
every day, work hard and pay more taxes than they receive in subsidies" is only barely true. If the country is afloat, it's taking on water and foundering badly.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Boeing posted a video of the actual flight at Farnborough, but it's a measly 360P resolution, and not as pretty as this practice film. If you're watching any screen bigger than your phone, watch this one.

Put the better part of four years of your life into it, and never even
get to see one, touch one, or sit inside one. But be a reporter for a
tech magazine and you get to take the yoke during a test flight...
Sounds like I made a wrong career choice somewhere along the line.

Come to think of it, I've spent a fair amount of the two years since I wrote that post working on that beauty. I have to live vicariously through these videos. Yeah, I know... whine whine whine.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Most people right now have those Looney Tunes-style question marks over their head. "How to make holes in things? Uh... with a drill and bit?"

Before you can answer that question, you need to know what the hole has to be for, how perfect it needs to be and what material it will be in. Sunday, for example, I needed a hole to clear a 3/8" bolt, through 1 3/4" thick hardwood. A portable drill is the right answer here; I started a pilot hole with a small bit (between 1/8 and 1/4") and then finished it with a 7/16" bit. Yes, deliberately oversized to allow some adjustment by jiggling the reloading presses while I set them in place. Ask a carpenter and this is the answer you'll get. It's the right approach for a very wide range of problems.

Ask a machinist and you'll be told that holes drilled with a drill bit in a drill press are never circular and never straight. Drill bits wander as they go through the work piece. For a hole that needs to be more circular and straight with a precisely sized diameter, machinists will use a boring head and boring cutter on the milling machine and gently feed the cutter into the work. Many use a pilot (undersized starting) hole to locate the feature and a boring head to enlarge to just about size, followed by a reamer to achieve the final size. A high quality, "heavy metal" or "big iron" boring head. A set of reamers sold like a set of drill bits. Sherline's miniature version is here:

That idea of starting with smaller bits and working up to bigger ones is universal. It will get your through lots of problems in the shop. Another thing to do is "peck" with the drill, advance the drill no more than a couple of diameters and then pull it back to help clear chips. Keeping the waste out of the hole helps the process. (Peck drilling is so important, it has its own command in CNC instructions). If you're drilling metal, a cutting/cooling fluid like a light oil can keep the bit from getting too hot and getting duller.

Chances are you've seen (or even have) a set of standard sized drill bits like this. But what you have to drill a deeper hole than those? Longer drill bits are available, like this set. Longer drill bits wander even more than short ones, but if it's the only way to cut a hole to pass a wire, you have to do it. Easily found twist drill bits get you up to a half inch holes. Spade bits for wood get you even bigger; over an inch. For larger holes, most people transition to a hole saw. Hole saws cut out a waste plug in the middle of the material and get you to even bigger holes, but usually not in very thick materials. For large holes in thin sheet metal, I've seen many people recommend these step bits. I've personally never used them as I don't do much sheet work. In my early ham radio days, when more people homebrewed their radios, a set of Greenlee punches for punching holes in metal chassis was absolutely da bomb. I've used a nibbler to cut out 1 1/2" holes for a pair of meters and almost lost the use of my hands from muscle fatigue! I've seen a nifty video of a power nibbler driven by your electric drill; that would be the way to go.

We could go on, but I'll cut it here. People have been making holes in things for a long time and a lot of clever solutions have been developed. We really haven't touched on making holes that aren't round. And we haven't even gotten near the topic of drilling a long piece of steel into a barrel without the bit wandering through the sides!

Monday, July 14, 2014

Katrina was a hurricane. A storm. Weather happens. The mess on the border is the product of policies designed to do precisely what they've done. Since Obama implemented the guts of the DREAM act by executive order, it has had the same effect as putting up signs like Michael Ramirez creates in this cartoon. Just read that article - from December of 2013 - if you're surprised by the crisis going on. Or this one from American Thinker.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

I hate to use that word in association with a project as big as moving into my shop, but I think everything I had pictured in my mind for moving in has been accomplished. Today, I mounted the reloading presses to their bench with 3/8 x 3" bolts. Even decapped about 40 pieces of .308 brass I shot a while back.

For completeness sake, the addition isn't done. The contractor is working through his last punch list. I hope to be done by the end of the month, but we're fully moved in, ready to reload or build or do anything.

Eric Holder sees "racial animus" when people are opposed to the Administration? Seriously?

Eric Holder sees racial animus when random dogs whiz on random fire hydrants. He sees racial animus in cloud patterns, when the sun rises, when the sun sets, when it's hot, when it's cold, when the most mundane of daily life's happenings take place. He sees nothing but racial animus in Every Freaking Thing 24/7/365.

This blatantly racist, pathetic little man, the least fit to be attorney
general in at least a generation, who said "America is a nation of
cowards" when it comes to race issues is a disgrace to his office and
this great country. Congress - this man needs to be arrested for
malfeasance.

Saturday, July 12, 2014

Since about Memorial Day weekend, my time has been split between getting the new shop going and tending to a problem with my aluminum boat. The boat is stored in the garage, and so it lives an easy life. Not exposed to rain, or other environmental problems; when we take it out, we wash it down, run the outboard for 10 minutes worth of freshwater flush, followed by renewing oil or grease layers and generally doing our best to keep it in top shape. During the work putting in the shop, we rolled a toolbox out of its normal position to behind the boat, and there it stayed for a couple of months. When I moved that toolbox back, I was stunned to find this hole in the back of the boat, on the left in this picture. The visible metal on the right is just a scuffed area where the buckle of the strap (just visible on the right edge) rubbed against it one day.

You're looking forward from behind the boat near the right (starboard) side. This is the transom, the vertical wall that's the back of the boat; the
outboard pushes on this and so it has to be strong. It undoubtedly gets
the strongest forces the boat experiences.

There's no mark of impact; no evidence anything hit the boat; if anything, the exposed metal looks dissolved. Since this is just inches away from that strap on the right (used in strapping the boat to the trailer for towing), and is large (about 3/4" long) I absolutely would have noticed it if it had been there when we last had the boat out. No, this formed while the boat was sitting in the air conditioned garage.

So my free time in the last month or so has been spent trying to understand what caused it, and if it's fixable. Some boat mechanics I've been able to talk with say it's galvanic corrosion caused by saltwater getting trapped in there, between the plywood core and the thin aluminum skin. (I do have a picture or two that appears to show salt crystals on the wood). The dissimilar materials set up a corrosion process. Experts tell me the only way to fix this is to tear the boat down to bare metal and replace all the wood. Rebuild it. There is some chance that this is electrolysis; that some current flows in the boat's metal hull from a damaged wire or something, and this current is what caused the corrosion. Last weekend, I put a kill switch in line with the battery, so that the battery will be completely disconnected when we're not on the water. That will help a lot if it's electrolysis, but have no effect if it's galvanic corrosion simply from some saltwater getting trapped in there.

There are other holes in the boat. These are smaller, on the order of 1/8" or less diameter. There are some on the left (port) side of the transom and along the on bow both sides. Only a couple on each side. Funny thing is they appear to be on the level of the bottom of the plywood deck of the boat. The experts I spoke with say that when a pinhole appears in the aluminum skin, the other side of the skin looks like a large corroded crater, many times larger in diameter.

Today, I sanded the holes down and especially along the edges of the bigger ones, using polymer/silicone wheels with SiC abrasive embedded in them. Once the edges of all of the holes were clean, I degreased everything with denatured alcohol, and then sealed them all with epoxy putty. We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see how well it bonded and some time (probably on the water) to see how well it holds up.

My gut feeling is that it isn't electrolysis, it's just galvanic corrosion. That means the boat is scrap - or soon will be. Holes will continue to appear, and enlarge. We can repeat today's work over and over, chasing new holes whenever they form, but eventually the boat corrodes away. The shame is that this is only a 9 year old boat - I've only had it 2 1/2.

* with apologies to Neil Young: it's not rust, it's aluminum oxide. The other word for aluminum oxide is sapphire, but Sapphire Never Sleeps just doesn't have the right connotation.

Friday, July 11, 2014

This morning, I came across a reference from the National Weather Surface that spoke of anticyclonic winds extending from the Arklatex to the Azores. From Texas to Europe?? A quick check of the amazing Earth website showed this:

A little tough to see when the lines aren't moving, but darkish blue means slow winds, greenish is stronger winds tending to orange and red for the strongest winds (usually only at higher levels in the atmosphere - these are surface winds). There really is a clockwise (anticyclonic) wind field from the coast of Spain to the coast of Florida and it actually does extend to Texas where it wraps up into the mainland of the US. That blue area covering a couple of thousand miles of open Atlantic is the relative calm characteristic of high pressure centers at the surface. What does this mean? Pretty much nothing. Just interesting.

The situation is somewhat different tonight, but the big picture summary of high pressure in control from the southeast coast of the US to Europe is still the same. Earth is one of those places I could spend hours watching.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

One of the little stories that has gathered quite a following this week is of Texas Tech cheerleader Kendall Jones, who posted pictures from African hunting trips on her Facebook page. The pictures ignited a firestorm of hate against Kendall and the incredibly evil company even took down some of her pictures. I say they're incredibly evil because they allowed at least two pages on Facebook dedicated to killing her. TMZ reports at least one of the pages was taken down although Facebook originally said the page "does not violate our community standards". Consider it simply the public outrage that got them to take the page down. I just checked the other one Doug Giles linked to and the name has been changed to "Screw Kendall Jones".

A Virginia Democrat who self describes as “I’m left of President Obama,” has offered $100,000 for nude pictures of the 19 year old. But this was only the first of the offensive tweets from the congressional candidate (like hell I'm going to link to this scumbag), who then went on to insult anyone who told him what he was doing was wrong. To quote from an interview conducted by The Blaze: (Note: I'm going to replace the scumbag's name with the word <scumbag> because I don't even want to give him that much press)

<scumbag> also described Jones’ enjoyment of hunting as “obscene.”

Asked why he thought it was ok to publicly shame a 19-year-old for
doing something that was perfectly legal, <scumbag> said, “She deserves
to be shamed.”

“I think anything that stops these people from killing these animals is legal,” he said.

Larry Frickin' Flynt is your mentor? The guy with a 9th grade education whose own daughter accused him of raping her? Nothing but class, Democrats. You may have finally found someone stupid enough and evil enough to play the idiot sidekick for Orlando's Alan Grayson.

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

I'm going to make the wild guess that most of you haven't seen McPherson guitars with the unusual location of the soundhole. Guitar design, like all design, is a series of choices and the offset soundhole allows them to have a larger sound board for a given body size, which turns into better dynamic range. It allows different internal bracing for the sound board, which they combine with other design and construction tricks to affect both the feel and the sound. More details here, if you're interested.

Wait! This guy does great parody songs! How have I not heard of him, yet??

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Experimenter Nathan Broadbent had one of those "why doesn't the world work the way I want?" moments that most of us get. Unlike most of us he decided to make his corner of the world work exactly that way.

A few months ago, I was inspired by this post on Reddit, titled: Food
items should have QR codes that instruct the microwave exactly what to
do. Like high for 2 minutes, let stand 1 minute, medium 1 minutes..

I thought this was a pretty cool idea, and that it would be a fun
project for a Raspberry Pi. I agreed with the people who thought using
UPC barcodes would be better, since products already have them, so I
went with a barcode scanner + online product database.

Here’s a summary of the features that I’ve added to my microwave:

Re-designed touchpad

Nicer sounds

Clock is automatically updated from the internet

Can be controlled with voice commands

Can use a barcode scanner to look up cooking instructions from an online database

Pretty cool - and pretty ambitious when you include starting the worldwide database of microwave cooking instructions. Lots of details at the link, but watch the video of how it ended up and actually works now.

Pretty amazing what a guy can do with relatively simple hardware and the experimenter's spirit.

Monday, July 7, 2014

All bloggers will know that we get emails from all sorts of spammers. I rarely get any of the strange, free form poetry that Tam has written about; I usually just get comments about how wonderful my blog is with a link to their site (completely unrelated to the post). Sometimes those are comically poor English, but don't rise to the level of poetry.

Some emails are harder to categorize as spam. In the last few months, I've gotten several complaints about browser problems. People report the blog looks bad on one browser and fine on others, or that they get weird popups. Some of these emails or comments are obviously spam; others harder to tell, but all seem to be based on the idea that we control that sort of stuff. We don't. Unless you're writing your own HTML templates, authors on blogger have very little control over such things. I'm sure only a small few of us do that.

Most strange things that pop up in your browser are on the reader's end and can be controlled with a hosts file. There are several sources of these around, but I use this one - the first one someone ever pointed me to. The site includes all the instructions you need to get started, but it's not really hard and you probably don't need to do everything they talk about.

Right now, some percentage of you are nodding in agreement, while the rest of you have Looney Tunes-style question marks in the air over your heads. What's a hosts file? Hosts is a plain text file that's put in a place reserved for Windows to look. The file is loaded when you open your browser and effectively presents a list of sites not to accept connections from! Presto - no browser hijacks, no redirects, no ads, no pop-ups (or, at least, lots less of them).

You can use a HOSTS file to block ads, banners, 3rd party
Cookies, 3rd party page counters, web bugs, and even
most hijackers. This is accomplished by blocking the
connection(s) that supplies these little gems. The Hosts
file is loaded into memory (cache) at startup, so there is no need to turn on, adjust or change any settings with the
exception of the DNS Client service (see below).
Windows automatically looks for the existence of a HOSTS file and if
found, checks the HOSTS file first for entries to the web
page you just requested. The 127.0.0.1 is
considered the location of your computer, so when an entry listed in
the MVPS HOSTS file is requested on a page you are viewing, your computer
thinks 127.0.0.1 is the location of the file. When this file
is not located it skips onto the next file and thus the ad server
is blocked from loading the banner, Cookie, or some
unscrupulous ActiveX, or javascript file.

Example - the following entry 127.0.0.1
ad.doubleclick.net blocks all files supplied by that DoubleClick Server to the web page you are
viewing. This also prevents the server from tracking your
movements. Why? ... because in certain cases "Ad Servers" like
Doubleclick (and many others) will try silently to open a separate connection on the webpage you
are viewing, record your movements then yes ... follow you to
additional sites you may visit.

The lovely and longtime computer technician Mrs. Graybeard volunteers at a free clinic for people without health insurance in an "I'll do anything to help" capacity. Several of the clinic's computers have had browser hijacks and malware that rendered them useless. By disinfecting them and then installing that hosts file, the number of such problems has dropped radically. I've been using one for years and have had one Trojan get through on my computers.

Like everything else, hosts files aren't a perfect answer. Some of the companies they block do legitimate businesses as well as less scrupulous thing. Some of the companies that send you commercial (solicited, not spam) email may use one of these blocked sites as the way they handle your email click. Sometimes you'll find a site that you can't get to even though you're sure it's there and legit; usually, the site you're clicking from has gone through an intermediary in the hosts file. If you absolutely must be able to click on an email link that the hosts file blocks, or get to that check out service, edit hosts as administrator (XP and Win7 for sure; don't know about others), and delete just that entry (you'll know which site it is from the error box in the browser). Exit and restart the browser. You'll now be able to get to that previously blocked website.

Finally, this is a kind of cyber warfare. Companies change their domain names to get around the hosts file block and new companies open up that the hosts file doesn't know of. It is updated regularly to address these changes. I have a hosts file on every computer at home, but not at work. The browsing experience is much more pleasant at home without the popups, pop unders, and all the other format ads I get at work.

Saturday, July 5, 2014

As proof, look no farther than Agora Financial’s 5-Minute Forecast’s
synopsis of the Federal Reserve's weekly H.4.1 statement, which they
characterize as “the Fed's consolidated balance sheet,” and found “$4.37
trillion in ‘assets,’ if that's what you want to call them, compared with
$56.3 billion in capital. That's a leverage ratio of 77.6- to-1.”

Leveraged 80 times! Imagine you borrowing 80 times as much as everything
you own!

“My question is as rates rise and the Fed’s $4.3 trillion load loses value (if they are not sold, there will be no recorded loss), is there any harm done to the rest of the world as that asset drops in value?”

The 5: Well, seeing as the Fed is leveraged something like 80-to-1 — far beyond any of the investment banks circa 2008 — that would render the Fed insolvent and incapable of managing the next financial crisis whenever it comes.

And there you have it. The Fed has $56.3 billion in capital and $4.37 trillion in assets they've bought. The Fed is pumping up the world's stock markets because if those markets go seriously down, the Fed goes bankrupt.

I've always said that the reason the banks want "persistent, benign" inflation is that it's better for them. That's a bit glib and short on detail; this provides some of that detail.

Another conspiracy "theory" becomes conspiracy "fact" as The FT reports "a cluster of central banking investors has become major players on world equity markets." The report, to be published this week by the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF), confirms $29.1tn in market investments,
held by 400 public sector institutions in 162 countries, which "could
potentially contribute to overheated asset prices." China’s State
Administration of Foreign Exchange has become “the world’s largest
public sector holder of equities”, according to officials, and we
suspect the Fed is close behind (courtesy of more levered positions at
Citadel), as the world's banks try to diversify themselves and "counters the monopoly power of the dollar.
...China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange has become “the world’s largest public sector holder of equities”,
as the report argues is “partly strategic” because it “counters the monopoly power of the dollar” and reflects Beijing’s global financial ambitions

The central banks own the stock markets? (Who else has $30 trillion??) And the Chinese are "the world's largest public sector holder of equities"? From there, it's a bit more difficult to see what percentage of the companies they own, but it's pretty close to the central banks and governments owning all the production capacity in the world. Governments owning the means of production... seems to me there's a word for that... World socialism, anyone?

"The inherent vice of capitalism is the
unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the
equal sharing of miseries."
...
Winston Churchill

Friday, July 4, 2014

Hate to be Dougie Downer on this day, but it came out that way. I had a lot of stuff tumbling around in my mind about the holiday for the last few days. I came across Kenny's Fourth of July post over on Knuckledraggin My Life Away, and a lot of it is in there. I think it's a really good summary of the state of the US today. Go read. I'll wait for you.

That 12-point drop pushes the United States
from among the highest in the world in terms of perceived freedom to
36th place, outside the top quartile of the 120 countries sampled,
trailing Paraguay, Rwanda, and the autonomous region of
Nagorno-Karabakh.

I've got to tell you that while I have a decent knowledge of geography (thanks to ham radio) I hadn't even heard of Nagorno-Karabakh. Gallup says Americans are losing confidence in every branch of the Federal Government, with confidence in congress at 7%, the president at 29% and the Supreme Court at 30%.

My take on the graph is that while the general trend of confidence is downwards, presidents seem to be more cyclic, rising and falling with their public perceptions.

Our oligarchy is in its newborn infancy, but it is hungry for power,
venal in its corruption, covetous of security, impatient of democratic
accountability and intolerant of dissent. Beware of legislative moves,
cloaked in high-sounding phrases, to regulate speech, circumscribe
criticism of public officials, grant police powers to private
corporations like BP, tax farm the many to benefit the few, and
generally exclude the public from important policy decisions by making
citizen participation in governmental process more complex, opaque,
indirect, financially burdensome and personally risky.

The polls show that the people are aware of this separation into a ruling class, a weaponized government willing to use every agency against the people who pay for it to exist. The question is how we get our freedom back. Reagan famously said, "Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again." On that question I don't have anything encouraging to say. If you haven't read Day by Day's link to "15 Things You Probably Do Not Know About Psychopaths", you ought to. It explains a good 80 to 90% of who you're dealing with.

Sigh... but this is a holiday. A good day for a barbecue or to grill something. Go send some rounds downrange. Practice Is Good. The problems will still be here tomorrow.

Thursday, July 3, 2014

German greenies calculate that a blog which gets 15,000 hits
or more a month (yay! we qualify!) pumps out 8 pounds of carbon dioxide a
year.

Well, gosh I qualify, too; Blogger tells me I get about twice that. And as far as I can tell, they're concentrating on the electric power that all the people who drop by use in reading my blog on their computers, so they're not even counting the cubic yards of methane I generate while writing, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas! Consequently, I've proudly posted Borepatch's graphic down below on the right sidebar.

Along these lines, another real life silliness story: when I had to fly to Canada last summer, I flew Air Canada and their subsidiary Rouge. We noticed that they had a calculated value for how much CO2 I was responsible for on the tickets. I realize there's very little effort there, probably a couple of instruction cycles for the computer processing the tickets, but it's still an amazing waste of instruction cycles when you consider how many people fly every day. I wonder how much CO2 is generated by the power it takes to run the computers to do that?

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Anyone who has honestly evaluated the current generation of wind turbines has to say they have so many problems that they're just not ready for prime time. Whether it's drawing excessive energy from the grid to operate, which results in them sometimes operating as an energy drain rather than producer, killing eagles along with other raptors and even bats, the green energy subsidies that hurt the local or national governments, causing illness or injury in nearby people, or simply being available only at the capricious whim of the wind, wind power simply hasn't lived up the hype. Wind farms even interfere with NOAA weather radar! It's a disappointment to everyone except the large crony capitalist companies that latched onto the free government money and put the turbines up.

Could this be about to change?

German physicist Albert Betz long ago (1909) calculated the maximum efficiency that a wind turbine could achieve, today called the Betz limit. According to Betz's law, no turbine can capture more than 16/27 (59.3%) of the kinetic energy in wind. Those monstrous infrastructure-sized turbines that we've all seen achieve about 80% of the Betz limit, or about 47% of the energy in the wind. But what about other shapes? The Dutch firm Archimedes tried the shape they named themselves after, the expanding spiral Archimedes' screw that has been used for pumping water since Archimedes' time. They claim an efficiency of 80% - not 80% of 59% - a true 80% of the energy in the wind. But it's better than even that:

Marinus Mieremet, cofounder of Archimedes, puts it this way: "Generally
speaking, there is a difference in pressure in front and behind of the
rotor blades of a windmill. However, this is not the case with the Liam
F1. The difference in pressure is created by the spatial figure in the
spiral blade. This results in a much better performance. Even when the
wind is blowing at an angle of 60 degrees into the rotor, it will start
to spin. We do not require expensive software: Because of its conical
shape, the wind turbine yaws itself automatically into the optimal wind
direction. Just like a wind vane. And because the wind turbine
encounters minimal resistance, it is virtually silent.

Part of the energy consumption of conventionally bladed turbines is that they need motors to point them into the wind. Their Liam F1 turbine self-yaws into the wind saving that energy. Another energy waste for conventional turbines is they need motors to start their blades when the wind is below about 15 mph; the Laim F1 turbine cuts in at about 4 1/2 mph. Its maximum output is 1.5 kW which it reaches when winds hit a little over 11 mph. Instead of huge infrastructure windfarms like GE makes, these are intended for individual homes (while1.5 kW still strikes me as terribly small, I'd sure like to have it in the blackouts after a hurricane).

While 4.5 mph is good number, what about less breeze than that? Nevada-based Wind Sail Receptor, Inc., (WSRI) is well into prototyping of a design that produces power with 3 mph winds. Their design looks like the plastic pinwheels you get at carnivals. The blades are of a special polyurethane material developed by inventor
and WSRI chairman Richard Steinke. "An AK-47 round won't go through the
blade. That's important in developing countries where we see a big
market for small turbines."

The shape of the blades is such that the turbines can capture more of
the wind than traditional designs and, thus, can do useful work at much
lower wind speeds. "I did 52 different iterations of blade shapes to
optimize the rpm to the torque generated," says Steinke. "Existing wind
turbines have a lot of inertia so they generally need a starter motor to
get them going in low winds. Once the wind hits about 15 mph, they can
run with winds as low as perhaps 7 or 8 mph. But our blade design lets
us start generating power at 3 mph and we don't use a starting motor. We
are fine tuning our generator and changing the bearing system and
believe will be able to start generating electricity at 1.5 to 2 mph."

Another benefit of the blade shape: essentially no noise. "Noise has been a
real environmental issue in many locations with the traditional wind
turbines operating in the 50 to 125 dB range. Our wind turbines run at a
sound level below 10 dB, about the sound level of normal breathing,"
says Steinke.

The noise, or perhaps the infrasonic pounding of the giant turbine blades now in use, appears to be is the cause of Wind Turbine Syndrome linked to above.

WSRI is going for larger systems than Archimedes; more like infrastructure systems but still not as large as the GE/Siemens types.

WSRI is now producing 6-ft diameter turbines and expects to begin making
12-ft. units shortly. It has set up prototypes in Boulder City, Nev.
and in Belgium. A 30-ft diameter model is awaiting completion of a
custom-designed generator from GinLong. The turbines initially will be
designed to work with 40 mph maximum winds until the generators get
optimized for the wind loads, at which time Steinke expects to produce
models able to operate at 50 mph wind speeds.

This strikes me as both cool innovations and interesting. A story that plays out in industry all the time is that the first approaches to a task get an industry going, but then revolutions come from smaller shops. Bright individual inventors who see a better way to accomplish things; sometimes they go after a niche market the big guys don't want to be bothered with, and sometimes David knocks off Goliath. This is really the best information on wind power that I've come across.

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About Me

Retired radio engineer, follower of Christ, RF designer, mentor. Radio ham, home shop machinist, lapidary, silversmith, roadie cyclist, learning to be a rifleman, and home defender, - a guy with too many interests to keep track of.

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SiGraybeard at gmail dot com.

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